Almost Perfect

by Marilyn Tracy

  She couldn’t begin to guess how far away the campfire was. The rarefied early spring air in the desert high plains, some four thousand feet above sea level and unimpaired by pollution or moisture, played tricks with the eyes. What seemed within a short walking distance might be as much as five long miles away.

  But surely the fire was theirs, which had to mean they were well enough to light it. Please let it be them, she prayed. Let them be warm and safe.

  And if they were, the moment they crossed the threshold of the ranch house she would take both of them apart, piece by beloved piece.

  She carefully pushed the Ranger across the flat plains, mindful of the dangerous ravines and sudden pockets of sand that would bog down even her four-wheel drive. She kept veering south and a bit east, slowing only every two minutes or so now to blast the horn.

  And then she saw the campfire plainly. And saw her children weren’t alone. Her heart jolted once, then again, and her hand gripped the steering wheel with near breaking intensity.

  Was it the Wannamacher brothers? Had they done the unforgivable and stolen her children in their determination to wrest her from her land? Had her refusal to back down to them resulted in the worst of unthinkable fates?

  She could only see one man, a great hulking silhouette standing before her two children. Neither Shawna nor Jenny—both fairly tall for their respective ages of eight and ten—came up to his waist. He couldn’t be one of the Wannamachers. Broad shouldered like they were, yes, but surely he was much, much taller.

  Even taller than Craig had been.

  She shoved the memory of her husband from her mind. He wasn’t there to help her. Couldn’t be there. This, and the host of other problems, was hers alone to deal with.

  She shouldn’t be worrying about this stranger. She should be thinking how to go about thanking him for rescuing her daughters. She wasn’t a suspicious person by nature, no matter how much fate had thrown at her in the past year. This trouble with the Wannamachers had her conjuring all sorts of bogeymen out of shadows.

  She told herself all that, but she pulled to a halt a cautious thirty yards from the camp, keeping the flood lamp on the three figures in front of her. She stepped down from the cab, but not before taking the 38 revolver from the glove compartment and firmly gripping it in her shaking hand.

  The Wannamachers had forced her to this unprecedented distrust, this fear-induced display of weaponry. The hell of it was, she didn’t even know if her gun was loaded or not.

  The man before the fire was a dark shadow, his hands slightly out from his body, his knees bent a little as if ready to run. . .or fight. Without speaking, he shoved Carolyn’s daughters behind him.

  Carolyn’s heart felt as if it were about to explode within her chest. She held the 38 up in a double-fisted grip and held her breath to stop her hands’ violent shaking. She expelled it swiftly.

  “What are you doing with my kids?” she demanded, fear making her voice harsh and uncompromising. “You let them go this second or I swear to God I’ll kill you where you stand.”

  “For God’s sake, lady, take them! I’ve been trying to get rid of them for hours!”

  “What?”

  “Mom!” her daughters cried in unison, jumping out from behind the stranger and pelting across the desert floor, into the pool of bright light and straight at her.

  “You found us!”

  “Pete shot a skunk! It didn’t stink or anything.”

  “Bratwurst ran away!”

  “He wouldn’t let us look at the skunk. I’ve never seen one up close.”

  “Pete fed us dinner and complained the whole time!”

  “Tell him we are not hooligans on the loose!”

  “Were you worried, Mom?”

  “Did Bratwurst come home?”

  “Did you think we were dead?”

  Carolyn, holding the gun skyward and above her daughters’ heads, hugged her girls tightly to her with her free arm, half lifting both of them off the ground. She fought tears of gratitude, the release of adrenaline-laden terror, and clung to the sweet, smoky warmth of her children. She felt an entirely new wave of love sweep over her, a tidal flow of relief and an aching need to hold them close.

  She looked up and across at the man she’d threatened with death if he didn’t release her children. He’d apparently kept her children safe, rescued them from a skunk and fed them dinner. And she’d pointed a gun at his chest. She straightened slowly.

  He’d walked forward into the light of the flood lamp. He was as tall as she’d thought, somewhere in the six-foot-four-inch range of huge. His short hair stuck up in spikes, as if he’d run his hands through it several times—after an evening with her precocious children, she could sympathize—and glowed in the combination of fire and flood lamp with auburn and gold highlights. She couldn’t see the color of his eyes nor a glint from his teeth, which could only mean he wasn’t smiling.

  She released her daughters and let them grasp her free hand and drag her forward “to meet Pete.” The unfamiliar weapon hung heavily at her right side.

  “I’m sorry,” she said, shaking loose of her daughters’ hands and transferring the gun to her left before holding out her palm to the tall stranger.

  He looked down at her outstretched palm for several seconds as if debating whether or not to touch her, before engulfing her hand in his. His grip was firm and her hand felt lost in the sheer size of his. Since she was a tall woman, five-eleven herself, she wasn’t used to feeling small around many men. But she did now. She couldn’t help looking down at their clasped hands.

  He gave it one short pump and released her as if her hand burned him. “Pete Jackson.”

  Carolyn resisted the urge to wipe her palm against her trousers. His touch seemed to linger on her fingers.

  “I can’t thank you enough,” she said as he stepped back, closer to the fire. She followed him. “I was worried sick.”

  He flicked a glance from her daughters to the gun at her side. “I can see that.” He didn’t say it with amusement.

  She didn’t have to explain herself; she had problems he couldn’t begin to guess, and her daughters had gone roaming against her permission and scared her to death. But for some reason, perhaps the lack of humor in the man standing before the fire, she felt she had to exonerate her behavior. “We’ve been having some trouble with a couple of people and I was afraid—”

  He waved a hand to cut her explanation short. “It doesn’t matter,” he said.

  “Mom—?”

  “Wait a minute, Jenny,” Carolyn said. “I’m really sorry about the threat.”

  “Forget it,” he answered gruffly, and turned his back on her. He reached across a narrow camp bed and collected the girls’ parkas and handed them across without looking at their mother. “This is everything, I think. It’s been real,” he added rudely as he backed away slightly, out of the glare of the flood lamp and into the shadows at the skirt of his camp.

  Another trick of the High Plains, she thought, knowing he stood within mere feet of them but was totally invisible to her due to the sharp contrast between light and dark. But if he’d really left, she’d have heard his boots crunching the dry grasses and crusty soil. And she could feel his eyes upon her still.

  Pete shoved his hands into his jeans pockets, curling his fingers around his palms. How long had he stood there holding her hand? He couldn’t begin to guess. But for a moment the clear February night had seemed colder, the stars strangely brighter. He watched her now and was oddly sorry he’d been so gruff with her.

  The girls, in their endless prattle, had gone on to some extent about their mother’s prettiness. He’d ascribed ninety percent of their evaluation to daughter loyalty and love. He realized now, watching her, the girls had already mastered the fine art of understatement.

  She wasn’t pretty, or even good-looking. Shawna and Jenny’s mother was drop-dead, staggeringly gorgeous. Model tall, she didn’t have the anorexic build of most models; instead, her
generous curves pushed at her blouse, nipped at her waist and perfectly filled her snug-fitting jeans. Her hair, longer and darker blond than her daughters’, danced on the slight breeze like a cloud of silk. Her face, oval and peach colored, seemed to invite a caress if only just to see if her skin was as soft as it looked.

  And Pete, who hadn’t felt a moment’s twinge of nerves in almost ten years, found himself suddenly tongue-tied and thinking of the girls’ offer to help their mother with her Wannamacher brother troubles.

  “We found him digging in the riverbed,” Jenny said. “He collects arrowheads, Mom!”

  He’d shown the girls the points he’d found and had discovered an oddly satisfying feeling of pride when they’d asked so many pertinent questions and admired the arrowheads with such wonder and awe.

  He hadn’t wanted the girls with him, God knows, but when their horse had run away when he shot the skunk, he couldn’t very well send them into the desert alone. He hadn’t fed them or chatted with them out of any desire for reward or altruism, but simply as a grim matter of necessity.

  For the first time since he’d glimpsed their shadows in the dry riverbed, he was glad their horse had shied, glad they’d stayed.

  And when their mother searched the darkness for him, smiling, some hard piece of the ten-year-old granite that had become his soul seemed to shift a little, chip somewhat in the face of her open, frank relief. He felt as if just by touching her, just by staring into her beautiful face, he could be like one of the arrowheads he dug from the ground; a treasure waiting to be found by a caring soul.

  He literally shook his head at the fanciful notion. Whatever part of him had softness or could have been tender had died years ago, was buried so deeply no amount of digging could ever drag it to light.

  “What are you shaking your head at?” Shawna demanded, joining him at the edge of the camp.

  “I—nothing,” he said, far more curtly than he would have wished.

  She grabbed his hand and pulled him into the light. “Mom, this is Pete. Pete, this is our Mom. Her name is Carolyn,” Shawna said, her upbringing evident in her swift recital of names. She even waved her hand between them.

  “We had steak for dinner, Mom!” Jenny said, grabbing her mother’s hand and pulling her toward Pete. He forced himself to stay put. “Pete barely cooks the steak at all, I mean like he eats it almost raw!”

  “It’s called rare,” Shawna corrected primly. “Lots of people eat it that way.”

  “Well, not me. Eeyucko!” Jenny stated flatly. “Come see the arrowhead Pete gave me. It’s too cool!”

  “It’s not just yours,” Shawna said, her elder-sister dignity forgotten in the fear of losing her share of the precious trophy.

  “We’d better head for home,” Carolyn said, and Pete sympathized with her daughters’ cries of dismay. A part of him didn’t want her to leave, either. Another part would have paid her good money to do so.

  “But we can’t leave without our arrowhead,” Jenny said.

  “Please, Mom? Can’t we stay awhile?”

  Carolyn looked from the girls to Pete and he felt something catch in his throat. He knew, from reading, from television; from a thousand impressions, that some lucky men out in the world had the good fortune to spend time with women like Carolyn Leary. Decent men with impeccable pasts. Men like doctors, lawyers, CEOs of major corporations. . . men who had never used might as right or threats as promises. Men, in other words, utterly unlike him.

  Blithely—and luckily—unaware of his thoughts, she shrugged a little and looked over at her still-running Ranger. “Let me call Doc and tell him I’ve found you two.”

  Shawna grasped the significance of the remark before Jenny. “Oh, no! Is everybody out searching for us?”

  “Really?” Jenny demanded. “Cool!”

  Carolyn’s smile disappeared and her glorious eyes narrowed. “It is anything but cool, Jennifer Leary. You weren’t supposed to be even close to this deep into MacLaine’s place. You were supposed to stay near the main house. You really, really, scared me.”

  Both Shawna and Jenny ducked their heads. Mumbled sorries came from two mouths Pete had sworn couldn’t turn down. He looked at Carolyn with new respect.

  “But maybe we’re keeping Mr. . . .?”

  “Jackson,” Jenny filled in. “But call him Pete. We do.”

  Pete’s lips twitched. “Stay for a cup of coffee,” he said, and immediately wondered what on earth possessed him to offer such a thing.

  She hesitated then smiled. “All right. Just give me a minute.”

  If he were a different man, one of the lucky ones, he’d give her far more than that, he thought.

  He could hear her clear, resonant voice rise to overcome the static on her cellular phone as she told Doc she’d found the girls safe and sound on the MacLaine place. It was too bad the girls hadn’t had a cell phone when they left their mother’s care; her worry could have been averted and he would have been rid of them a lot sooner.

  Jenny and Shawna both seemed awed that an honest-to-goodness search for them had been in progress, and were eager to explain to him who Doc Jamison was, how the man had lost his wife only a year ago, and what he’d done to fix up their animals when they’d gotten sick.

  “And last week? Bratwurst ate something that didn’t agree with him, you know? And Doc said. . .”

  But Pete was only half listening to Jenny’s story; like salmon seemingly inexplicably drawn upstream, he found himself unconsciously memorizing Carolyn’s slow, Texan drawl, her laughter, her lilting farewell.

  She hung up the phone, turned off the car and the flood lamp, plunging them into the intimate desert darkness the campfire did little to dispel.

  “All’s well,” she said, coming to join him.

  It was anything but well, he thought. Anything. But he noticed she’d left the .38 behind. He wanted to tell her she was a fool to trust a complete stranger. At the same time, something about her made him want her to trust him, to accept him at face value, to recognize him as the man he used to be, long ago.

  He forced a smile to his lips and said, “Coffee’s hot.” He grimaced as he noted that his hands were shaking a little as he poured the coffee.

  “The best way,” she replied, accepting a mug. She took a cautious sip and said she found it delicious. “What are you doing way out here?” she asked.

  He shrugged a non-answer.

  Shawna piped up, “He’s collecting arrowheads. We were right, Mom. Indians were here!”

  “He’s got lots of them. Like millions.”

  “Yeah. You should see them!”

  Carolyn appreciated the fact that Pete didn’t correct their exaggeration, and felt warmed by an almost tender smile that crossed his full lips as he listened to her daughters.

  After having spent all her life in the desert southwest, she was accustomed to reticent men. Her husband had been a man of few words, not shy by any means, but careful with his verbal expenditure. Therefore, Pete Jackson’s solemn quiet didn’t jar her as it might have another woman.

  But as she followed him into the campfire glow, she found a few things about him that triggered more than one alarm bell. The first was his presence on private property without any visible vehicle. The second was his accent: he wasn’t from around these parts. The third was the newness of his clothing. Dusty as they were, his fairly expensive hiking boots had obviously been purchased in the past few weeks. His turquoise shirt probably hadn’t felt the inside of a washing machine more than once and he wore it over a still-snow-white T-shirt. The hard water in this part of the desert precluded hospital white without copious amounts of bleach and he didn’t seem the bleach-in-the-wash type. His jeans, though stone-washed, still had the broad leather label fully intact on his back pocket, a dead giveaway as to their recent purchase. No one she knew could afford new clothes meant to be used for digging in the sandy desert and those that could wouldn’t be caught dead in them.

  Another thing that set off the
alarms in Carolyn’s mind was the meticulous arrangement of his camp. Military in its precision, the camp looked like a movie set, a mock site. Somehow he’d even confined Shawna and Jenny’s clutter to one small pile.

  In her previous life, before low wages and bank foreclosures forced her to move them to Almost, Carolyn had worked as a social psychologist, specializing in helping newly released parolees readjust to mainstream life. Recently released prisoners seemed to fall into two categories: wildly disorganized and incapable of dealing with the smallest detail of outside life, or meticulously tidy, in furious control of each single aspect of their new lives. Both types of men, if they remained out of prison, would eventually moderate their personal habits to less extreme ends of the order spectrum.

  But Pete Jackson’s campsite painted the picture of a man recently, very recently, either ejected from prison or from years in the military. Either of those two backgrounds might account for the tidiness and the newness of his clothes, but both of them established him as a man outside of the normal rules of society.

  “Cream?” he asked. “I’ve got some half-and-half.”

  A man in the middle of the desert with all new things, no vehicle in sight, no horse grazing nearby, and a container of half-and-half? Curiouser and curiouser, she thought, thanking him while rejecting the offer.

  He opened another tidily arranged container of cold food items, pulled out a thermos and added a generous dollop of cream to his own mug. Most men would have carelessly pushed the cooler lid shut, but Pete Jackson swiftly, precisely, moved his large hands over the seams to ensure its airtight sealing.

  Maybe he was just a rigid control freak, she thought, but when he turned, and his gray—his eyes were definitely gray, she realized with a sense of shock, though she couldn’t have said why she felt surprise—eyes met hers, she had the dizzying sensation that while control might be a distinct issue in this man’s life, he was anything but rigid.